Osama bin Laden’s hours in a dark Afghanistan cave the evening of the Sept. 11 attacks were brought to light when his son-in-law testified in his own defence at his terrorism trial, portraying the al-Qaeda leader as worried and apprehensive as he contemplated how America would respond.

The son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, said the al-Qaeda leader asked him hours after the attacks what he thought would happen next.

“Politically, I said, America, if it was proven that you were the one who did this, will not settle until it accomplishes two things: To kill you and topple the state of the Taliban,” Abu Ghaith said he told him.

Bin Laden responded: “You’re being too pessimistic,” Abu Ghaith recalled in a discussion that he said went late into the night.

He said bin Laden had sent a messenger to pick him up earlier on Sept. 11 from a house in Kabul where he had watched the news unfold on TV. He said bin Laden told him: “We are the ones who did it.”

He said he had met bin Laden only six or seven times previously before he was brought to the cave in a rough mountainous area.

The surprise testimony Wednesday by Abu Ghaith seemed to soften the image of the one-time Kuwaiti teacher and preacher known for fiery anti-American rhetoric on widely circulated post-attack videos until a prosecutor took his turn, eliciting damaging admissions from the 48-year-old defendant before showing a videotape on which Abu Ghaith spoke that included a hijacked plane slamming into a World Trade Centre tower.

The next morning, Abu Ghaith said, he saw Laden with an al-Qaeda military leader, Abu Hafs al-Masri, and current al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri at breakfast, and bin Laden invited him to join them.

He said bin laden told him: “Now, after these events, … it’s a no-brainer to predict what is going to happen. What you expected may actually happen. And I want to deliver a message to the world. And Dr Ayman also wants to deliver a message. I want you to deliver that message.”

Within two hours, the four men were posing in front of a rocky backdrop as Abu Ghaith spoke using what he said were “bullet points” provided by bin Laden that mixed verses from the Quran with justification for the terror attacks.

It was a position that would bring the one-time imam infamy as well as a place in the inner circle of the world’s most wanted terrorists and eventually to federal court in Manhattan, where he was brought after his capture last year in Jordan.

The allegations are “baseless, ridiculous. Nothing new/credible, all speculations already proven false,” Pakistan military spokesperson Lt Gen Asim Bajwa said in a post on microblogging site Twitter. Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson Tasnim Aslam, too, denied Wednesday’s New York Times report, saying: “There are many inconsistencies in the article. The author herself talks about suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge. So it is not something serious.” Intelligence sources, on condition of anonymity, had also rejected the story titled ‘What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden’, adapted from the book ‘The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014’, to be published next month.

Soon after the US Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden’s house, “a Pakistani official told me the US had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad,” senior NYT journalist Carlotta Gall wrote in the article. PTI